The Heart of Haiku (2 page)

To understand Bashō’s place in Japanese poetry, it’s useful to have some sense of the literary culture he entered. The practice of the fine arts had been central to Japanese life from at least the seventh century, and virtually all educated people painted, played musical instruments, and wrote poems. In 17
^th
century Japan, linked-verse writing was as widespread and popular as card games or Scrabble in mid-20
^th
-century America. A certain amount of rice wine was often involved, and so another useful comparison might be made to playing pool or darts at a local bar. The closest analogy, though, can be found in certain areas of online life today. As with Dungeons and Dragons a few years ago, or Worlds of War and Second Life today, linked verse brought its practitioners into an interactive community that was continually and rapidly evolving. Hovering somewhere between art-form and competition, renga writing provided both a party and a playing field in which intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity might be put to the test. Add to this mix some of street rap’s boundary-pushing language, and, finally, the video images of You-Tube. Now imagine the possibility that a “high art” form of very brief films might emerge from You-Tube, primarily out of one extraordinarily talented young film-maker’s creations and influence. In the realm of 17th-century Japanese haiku, that person was Basho.

When Bashō was twenty-two, Yoshitada, his boyhood friend, supporter, and possibly lover, died. This loss, ten years after the death of his father, resulted once again in a kind of chrysalis-expulsion. Some accounts say Bashō entered a monastery immediately after his friend’s death; others report that he fathered a child. Based on the poet’s own later comments, he seems to have passed through something akin to what the Amish refer to as “wilding,” a period of sampling everything the sensual world has to offer. He continued to write—his poems appear in anthologies from this time—but nothing further is known of the next five or six years. When Bashō’s life comes again into view, he is living in Kyoto and the editor of a published volume of haiku,
The Seashell Game
, in which thirty sets of paired haiku are compared. The assembler of such a collection acted as teacher, critic, and judge, pointing out the merits and lapses of each haiku, and selecting a winner from each pair. Bashō entered two haiku of his own in the competition. Of one—a poem mentioning a kind of Japanese jacket— Bashō, as judge, wrote of his own contribution: “Ill-tailored and badly dyed, its failures are due to lack of craftsmanship on the poet’s part.” The haiku lost its match to the other contestant.

At twenty-eight, Bashō moved two hundred miles to the new city of Edo (now known as Tokyo). A merchant city far from the imperial capital and its entrenched traditions, Edo attracted many young men for the social mobility, cultural upheaval, and freedom it offered, and with few master poets already in residence, Bashō’s chances of finding paying students were probably higher there as well.  On leaving, he sent a haiku to a friend in Ueno, as promise that he would return:

Clouds come between friends

only briefly—

a wild goose’s migration.

kumo to hedatsu tomo ka ya kari no ikiwakare  

While establishing himself as a poet, Bashō worked in the offices of a city water distribution company. He also began looking after a young nephew, Tōin, who came from Ueno to live with him. Many of Bashō’s students were samurai or rich merchants, and Bashō’s own family origins meant he could have chosen for himself a position of greater prominence and power. He remained aware all his life of the path not taken. But poverty, for Bashō, was neither accidental nor incidental. It was a honing stone for the sharpening of awareness. 

Exposed early to uncertainty, loss, and disruption, evidence suggests Bashō was susceptible to depression. Rather than distract himself from hardship, however, Bashō turned toward its investigation. In his early thirties, he began a period of intensive study of Zen at the temple of a local priest, Butchō. For a time he considered priest ordination. Instead, at 35, he took the vows of a lay monk, committing to a Buddhist practice undertaken within the context and circumstances of ordinary life. During these years he also studied Taoism and the classical-era poets of both China and Japan. He drew from and carried these works with him the remainder of his life. 

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes. Poetry can be thought of in much the same way, and the recognition of impermanence, ceaseless alteration, and interdependence—the connection of each person, creature, event, and object with every other—need not be “Buddhist.” These elements permeate the poetry of every tradition, from the
carpe diem
poetry of Horace and the Nahuatl “flower songs” of 16
^th
-century Mesoamerica to the work of current American poets informed by ecology, postmodern philosophy, and quantum physics.

Still, Bashō chose Zen as the model for his life as well as his poems, making it his path in both figurative and literal senses. Emulating both the wandering monks of his own time and the earlier Buddhist poets Saigyō and Sōgi, he began traveling for months at a time in tonsure and monk’s robes, depending for his sustenance on what might be offered him along the way. “I look like a priest,” he wrote in his first travel journal, “but I am a layman. I am a layman, but my head is still shaved.” A sharp Zen spirit glints from his poems, in their compassion, insights, and humor, and in the quietly Buddhist stance of poet and object as “not one, not two.” In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bashō instructed, “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or too objective?” his student asked. Bashō answered, simply, “No.”

The fidelity of Zen is to this world, and to how we see and taste it in our lives and our lives in it. Bashō’s haiku—there are over a thousand—have a similar allegiance. They find the gate to Zen’s experience of
thusness
in the face of a man with mumps-swollen cheeks walking in bitter winter wind or in the sight of a woman tearing salted cods into strips, shaded by a bucket of flowering azalea. A rare haiku explicitly using the vocabulary of Zen appears in a letter Bashō sent to one of his students. In the letter, he first quotes a Zen master’s warning: superficial understanding of the teachings can cause great harm. The poem reads:

how admirable—

a man seeing lightning

and not satori
^*

inazumani satoranu hito no tattosa yo

Shinto, Japan’s other major spiritual tradition, saturates Bashō’s poems as well, most noticeably in the importance given to place and the way that particular places come to embody certain feelings and themes. Shinto’s
kami
spirits live not in generality, abstraction, or paradise but embedded in the earthly, visitable, and local—shrines, mountains, islands, fields, and trees. Bashō’s lifelong practice of poetry pilgrimage joined Zen non-attachment with Shinto’s deep-seated spirits of place.

*

Of the haiku Bashō wrote during his late twenties and early thirties, the earliest were often clever or charming, though even these poems often reflect the poet’s seemingly innate compassion and deep sympathy for all beings. Some clearly respond to the circumstances of his personal life. Many show an increasing involvement with Chinese poetry, Zen, and the growing desire to find in a single moment, fully perceived, the multifaceted depths we feel also in Cezanne’s painted apples or Durer’s hare etched into place amid grass.

Here are a few of these early poems. The first was written at age twenty-two, when Bashō was attempting the cleverness then popular among cutting-edge poets:

looking exactly like

blue flag iris: blue flag iris

inside the water’s shadow

 kakitsubata nitari ya nitari mizu no kage 

The main point in the original Japanese is the poem’s mirroring construction: two identical words at the haiku’s center replicate both visually and in sound what is being described. In Japanese, which is written vertically, the visual onomotopoeia is even more clear; a small “cutting-word,”
ya,
creates the slim line of water dividing the flower stem’s two apparently equal selves. Yet even in this poem of displayed wit, we find also the echo of a Buddhist question addressed throughout Japanese poetry: what in life is real, what is illusion?

In other early poems, Bashō’s distinctive perception, empathy, humor, and friendship with all existence begin to emerge:

“Written at the house of a person whose child has died”

a withered, leaning, out-of-joint world—

bamboo 

upside down under snow

shiorefusu ya yo wa sakasama no yuki no take

a cuckoo!

masters of haiku

vanish

hototogisuima wa haikaishi naki yo kana

shy

above flowers’ faces,

a hazy moon.

hana no kao ni hareute shite ya oborozuki 

a hangover?

who cares,

while there are blossoms  

futsukayoi  monokawa hana no aru aida   

cutting a tree,

seeing the sawn trunk it grew from:

tonight’s moon

ki o kirite motokuchi miru ya kyō no tsuki

This tree-cutting haiku presents fertile ground for looking more deeply at poetic image in haiku, and in general.

In Japanese poetry, allusion to the moon is always, first, the moon itself, actual in the night sky. But the image holds almost always some additional meaning—often a Buddhist reference to awakened understanding. With this in mind, various readings of “cutting a tree” begin to emerge. It can be understood as a glimpse of enlightenment, an opening of consciousness fallen suddenly into inside the ordinary moment of felling a tree. It can be read as bitter: the moon is as opaque to the mind as a tree stump. It can be read as comic: the poet, having had no time to look up, finds the moon right under his eyes. It can be read as luminously descriptive: the yellow color of a rising moon recognized as exactly the color of fresh-cut pine.  It can be taken as describing the experience that came from sawing down a tree, as describing the moon, or as offering a small Buddhist parable about long effort leading to sudden awakening. It may be that Bashō intended all these meanings. Equally, it could be that he had no intention in mind, and the juxtaposition of moon and tree trunk simply arose, amid the scent of fresh sawdust.

Haiku’s suggestiveness is penumbra, not umbrella. Still, human vision is subjective, and there is a further complication for Western readers: the haiku read alone on a page, blurred by lack of shared cultural reference and by translation, was often originally written in circumstances both specific and knowable by its original readers. As mentioned earlier, many of Bashō’s haiku were composed as part of linked verse gatherings. Others were written for poetry competitions with assigned subjects. Many were personal communications—messages sent between friends, between guest and host or teacher and student—or placed within travel journals or the prose settings of haibun, which gave them added meaning. Some were written about paintings, places, objects, or played on then-well-known phrases opaque to an uninformed reader. Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making. Still, if a person finds a particular haiku baffling or lifeless, that may be because some essential piece of information is missing.  A hangover is universally comprehensible. That the specialized lumbering word that means “sawn tree trunk” also means “source,” in an ontological and metaphysical sense, is not—though once this is pointed out, the implication is clearly there, resident in the originating image. 

*

When he began to take poetry writing seriously, Bashō was influenced by the rapidly changing aesthetics and schools of poetry of the time. It was a period as volatile as that in American poetry between the 1950s, when most poets were working in formal meter and rhyme, and the late 1970s, when some poets turned to using language in the way the abstract expressionists had used paint. Between these aesthetic periods come both the revolution made by the Beat poets and the “deep image” poetry of Robert Bly, James Wright, and others.      

The aesthetic transformations proposed in turn by the Beats and the deep-image school parallel oddly closely those of Bashō’s own lifetime: in each case a radical loosening of language, taste, and subject matter breaks open arthritic conventions of poetic decorum, then is followed by the turn toward a poetry quieter of surface and more inwardly centered. Bashō’s first haiku were written under the influence of a school that advocated word-play, transgression, and turns on well-known earlier classical works. He next wrote poems of simpler, everyday language and imagery that used humor and earthiness as a way to break poetry’s diction free from old ruts. (One haiku from this time parodies a classical scene of courtly love by showing a female cat in heat scrambling over a broken-down cookstove to reach her tomcat lover.) These taboo-breaking intentions were not Bashō’s invention; they were the fashion of the day—and, it must be added, in no way as lastingly significant as the work of the Beats. But these early foundations instilled in Bashō the experience of a poetry in which almost anything could be said. “Madman’s poetry,” one such style was called. Bashō kept this grant of liberation throughout his life, turning it toward continually deepening ends until its final appearance in his late-life advocacy of the haiku of “lightness.”

The practice of Zen also works to free the mind from its habits of conventional perception. By 1678, Bashō was no longer studying with other teachers, but had taken students of his own, and was developing his own sense of haiku’s possibilities, intentions, and role. For inspiration, he turned less to contemporary poets than to ancient Japanese and Chinese poems reflecting Buddhist and Taoist themes, especially the works of Sōgi, Saigyō, and the Chinese poets Tu Fu and Li Po—poetic tunings that three centuries later would come to influence the deep image poets of America as well.